by Flynn Berry
• • •
My father is alone inside his house now. I can hear water in the sink, glass clinking. The lights switch off. I wait. Thin smoke still curls from the fire pit. He hasn’t cleared their plates. In the darkness, a bird lands on the table and begins to peck at the meat.
He’s had a lot to drink. The bottle of rakija is empty, and how many beers before that? Three? He keeps a tire iron in the back of his car. I could carry it into the house, where he’s asleep in bed. He must be drunk enough not to wake at the sound.
I won’t, though. Of course I won’t. I wasn’t lying to Nell. During my training shifts in A and E, I saw the moment someone passes from life to death. I could never do that to someone, not even him.
35
MY FATHER is sitting in the corner of a café the next morning with a tablet, a legal pad, and an espresso. He scrolls on the tablet, taking down notes, reading over a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. I set my phone on the floor, kick it under the next table, then stand, rifling through my bag. “Sorry,” I say to him. “Have you seen a phone? I can’t find mine.”
He lifts his head, with a courteous, reserved expression. I’m aware of my rusty hair, cork sandals, the flesh of my shoulders rounding where the straps of my tank top cut into it.
“I haven’t, no,” he says. He’s flattened his accent, so he might be from any number of places. He caps his pen and begins to look around him for the phone. I go to the counter to ask if anyone’s turned one in, and the clerk shakes her head.
“Here you are,” he says. When I turn around, he’s holding it out to me, loosely, between thumb and forefinger.
The shattered screen is a nice touch, I think, for a backpacker. Genuine, too. I dropped it on the canal towpath a few weeks ago. “Thank you so much.”
He says, “Not a problem.” His tone is pleasant but clipped, like he’s trying to signal that he has to return to work now.
“I’m Sarah.”
“Grant,” he says.
“Losing it would have been a disaster, I’m only visiting.” He nods politely. It’s not going to work, we won’t fall into conversation, we won’t become acquaintances, he won’t tell me anything about himself. He’s not giving me any openings, and it will seem odd if I try to force it.
He looks at the yoga training book on my table, and his expression turns wry, like he’s thinking I’m probably not particularly good at yoga. Next to the yoga book is a large, flaky pastry stuffed with pistachios and honey. No discipline either. “Thank you again.”
“You’re very welcome,” he says, and we both return to our seats.
Grant. It wasn’t one of the names I’d imagined, but it suits him. He takes notes from the tablet, and I turn the pages of the yoga book, the paper sticking to the honey on my fingers. I notice that he has a tattoo on the inside of his forearm. A row of Greek letters, which I copy into my book to look up later.
After a half hour or so, he packs his tablet in a leather briefcase. I recognize its silver buckles and the lock on its flap, I used to play with it. All of his things went to my grandmother after his disappearance. He may have asked James to bring him a few of his favorite belongings after she died, or ordered a new briefcase from the same company. He’s noticed me staring, and I turn my face down to the book, to a diagram of a spine twisting, until he’s gone.
A few minutes later, I move to the doorway and watch him step into a stucco house down the road. I’d passed it on the way here. It’s a reiki center, with a wind chime above the door, and next to it a box of leaflets about craniosacral therapy.
I’ve never had a craniosacral massage before, but imagine it as an extended version of when someone washes your hair before a cut. A shivery sensation, lifting the hairs on your arms. The pressure suddenly draining from your head as they press your temples or work their knuckles against the base of your skull. The best sensation in the world, then. I’m always so disappointed when they switch the water back on.
Hollow wooden notes scatter from the wind chime. The shades are drawn over the windows. He’s inside having a reiki session, he’s lying on a table in a treatment room while someone massages his head. Or he’s having pure reiki, in which the practitioner doesn’t touch you but, per the leaflet, circulates your energy. He thinks he deserves this, even after what he did.
• • •
In my hotel room, I find a chart online of the Greek alphabet. I open the yoga book to where I copied down his tattoo and match each of the symbols to a letter. It takes me a while. One of the symbols could be a few of the Greek letters, I hadn’t been able to see it very clearly. I copy the letters one by one into a translate box. Eleutheria is the transliteration. Freedom.
* * *
—
A WASPS’ NEST hangs above his yard, a large oval of crumbling gray layers, like papier-mâché. Wasps hum around it. My father is standing under the nest, shaking a canister. I lean forward from my position on his neighbor’s deck to see around the scrim of pine needles. A metal ball clicks inside the canister as he shakes it. He aims the nozzle and a jet sprays against the nest, foaming on its surface. I read once, on the sort of site I used to visit, that you should carry wasp poison instead of mace, since its spray can reach twenty feet.
The wasps leave the nest, a glittering cloud of them lifting above the tree. My father climbs a stepladder under the branch, holding a baseball bat. A few last wasps still hover around him. He might be allergic to their stings. He might not know, most people aren’t tested for it. His blows land with muffled thuds, until the nest splits from the branch and falls to the ground.
An hour later, I walk down his driveway, past the empty trellis. The jeep’s gone. He took it into town, according to the signal from the key fob. The wasps’ nest is still on the ground, split open into segments of ashy gray chambers.
A smell of kerosene rises from the fire pit. Pieces from some project are on a work table in the grass. He’s left out a saw, with a stretched wire instead of a blade, like a larger version of the one we used in pottery class at school. I remember how easily the wire sliced through clay.
I climb the deck stairs and slide open the glass door. He has a wooden dowel to lock it from inside, but it’s leaning upright against the wall. I pick it up, even though I know it’s unnecessary—he’s in town, I watched him leave, and the key fob will tell me if he’s coming back—and carry it with me through the rooms.
My father stayed in a house in Laurel Canyon once. Decades ago, but it must have made an impression. He has the same low wooden chairs and rush mats. On the windowsill is a handful of rough pink quartz crystals. I read the titles on his bookshelf, upset to see we’ve read some of the same ones. The house has a distinct smell, deep and loamy, that I can’t place.
The other room is even more spare. A bed, a desk facing the ocean. A laptop is open on the desk, with a black screen. I feel too jittery to go through it yet, but force myself to sit down. The wooden dowel is slick with my sweat. I rest it against the desk and wipe my hands on my jeans.
I open the spreadsheets and documents saved on his desktop. It takes me a while to work out what they are. He trades index funds. For himself, and some clients, through a shell company, presumably, registered offshore. So this is how he’s supported himself. He seems to specialize in clean energy.
His email account won’t load without a password. I open his browser history for the past three months, as far back as it goes, and take pictures of it.
His kitchen is at the other end of the main room behind a polished stone counter. I open the fridge. All of the shelves are wiped clean, the food neatly arranged. A plastic tub with “BEEF BROTH” written in marker on a piece of masking tape, black garlic, a jar of white miso paste.
I open the cabinets. Glassy panes of dried seaweed. Maca powder, cordyceps, bee pollen, spirulina, chaga. The tops of the bags are folded over and held with bright plastic c
lips. I remove the clip on the bag of mushroom tea. That’s the smell throughout the house, that wet-earth smell.
He can’t get this stuff in town, he must have to order it online. It makes me furious. All this care in tending to his body, when Mum and Emma have nothing, can experience nothing, because of him.
• • •
I’ve been in his house for over an hour now, and it’s started to seem like he’s never coming back. The jitteriness is gone, replaced by a sort of trance. There’s no wind, everything in and out of the house is still.
I take my time. There is a safe in his wardrobe. A small one, but large enough to hold documents, cash, a gun. I try a few combinations, without success. I’m checking the map for the location of the key fob less and less often.
I’ve been in his bathroom for a while, sifting through blister packs and prescriptions. Nothing unusual. An expired antibiotic, melatonin capsules, aspirin, toothpaste. On its side, hidden behind the antibiotic, is a tube of lipstick.
I twist it open. The lipstick is light pink and has been used often. Someone’s mouth has shaped it into a crescent.
I go back through the rooms. Nothing else, though, that clearly belongs to a woman. No shoes or hairpins. No notes or photographs. The lipstick is an odd shade of pastel pink. The sort of color someone young would wear.
I replace the dowel against the wall. The wood is still damp from my sweat. I like the idea of him noticing that, mystified and unsettled.
I’m tempted to leave something else behind. I could unscrew the lid from one of his jars and leave it out on the counter, so he couldn’t be sure if he left it there or if someone else was inside the house. But it would only harm me, in the end, to warn him about what’s coming.
I close the door and turn away. There’s a clatter from inside as the dowel falls into the runner. I push at the handle but the door doesn’t move, of course, it’s locked from inside, the dowel holding it in place.
I circle around the house. The front door is the only other entrance, and it’s locked. I shove my shoulder against it, then look at the map. The pin is moving. It must have been moving for a while, actually. He’s already at the base of the hill.
I can hear an engine. The muscles tense at the back of my neck and sweat prickles across my skin. I pelt up the road. When I hear his car behind me, I force myself to slow to a walk. The engine grows louder. He should have turned into his drive by now, I think, he must have gone past it. My ears pin back.
But then there’s the sound of gravel churning, and when I turn around he’s pulling in to the driveway. I duck behind the generator as a car door slams. I wait until after the sweat has dried on my skin, then climb onto the scooter and drive down the hill.
He must have seen me walking on the side of the road. Which would seem odd, there’s nothing in this direction, the road ends at the top of the hill next to the generator. But seeing a woman walking near his house, and the door being locked from inside, can’t be enough to make him run. Maybe the woman was on her way to hike the back of the hill, maybe the dowel slipped on its own.
Was there dirt on my sandals when I went into the house? Did I put the food back in the right order? I wasn’t careful. I can’t believe now how uncareful I was.
I don’t remember putting the lipstick back in the cabinet. I remember taking it out and looking at the color, but not replacing the cap. I might have left it out on the sink.
* * *
—
AT THE HOTEL, I run a cold shower. I’m in a towel, combing my hair, when my phone rings.
“Claire Alden?”
“Yes,” I say, and the telescoping begins, the numbness, bracing for what I’m about to hear about my brother.
“I’m calling from Penbridge. Your brother’s here.”
“What?”
“He arrived this afternoon. He won’t have his mobile for the first week, but you can call this number if it’s really urgent.”
She asks if I have any questions about the twenty-eight-day program. My face is wet, and it’s like a soft avalanche, all through my body.
“Do you need my bank information?”
“He wants to pay for it himself, but we do need a guarantor.”
“Yes, of course.”
After the call, I rush down the stairs and onto the cobbled streets. The buildings are tabbed with open shutters, and I look up at them as I walk, brimming with the news.
I can go home now. There’s a small police station in Hvar Town. They might make the arrest, or Interpol might send officers. But once I do that, it’s over. His house will be cordoned off and he’ll be in custody. I’ll only get the scraps that come out in police statements or during the trial. It won’t be like this.
* * *
*
• • •
At eight in the evening, the pin for his key fob starts to move. If he drives towards Stari Grad and the ferry, I’ll call DI Tiernan, but the pin stops in a lot behind DiVino. When I walk to the harbor, my father is having dinner on the restaurant’s terrace. He’s wearing a heavy silver watch and a shirt with the cuffs folded back. His friend—another man, about his age—is separating the bones from a whole grilled fish.
I stay behind my father. I’m in different clothes now, but he must have noticed me on his road, I can’t risk him seeing me again. I watch as he talks with his friend and uses a fork to dig the meat from a bowl of mussels. I want to know if he ever thinks about his son. If he ever has a sense of how much Robbie has suffered.
His friend gestures at the large yacht anchored in the channel, and my father turns to look at it, his face in profile, his chin resting in his hand. I heard two tourists talking about that yacht yesterday, saying that its windows are made of bulletproof glass. I wonder what the owner has done to make that necessary, and watch as my father’s friend pours them both more wine.
36
AT THE HOTEL the next morning, I type in another address from his browser history, which opens a discussion thread on pu-erh tea. I’m halfway through the history now. He visits forums and news sites often, on diving, mostly, and nutrition, some political ones. He checks the weather and the surf report, to plan dives, probably. He seems to be considering the purchase of a sailboat.
I type in one address and a video loads. It’s not porn, exactly. Two women sit on a bed in gingham dresses, touching each other’s arms and hair. Their dresses lace up the front, and they pull at the ribbons, which are like white shoelaces, before the video abruptly ends.
A handful of names appear in his search history. Most of them are his clients, I recognize them from the documents on his desktop. Three, though, don’t seem related to his work. I’ve heard of the first one, the heir to a Greek shipping firm. His yacht has visited Hvar Town, maybe they’ve met, maybe he’s a potential client. The second is a farmer in North Yorkshire. The third is a nurse in Boston, Tessa Martin. Her name sounds familiar, but I can’t remember where I’ve heard it.
There isn’t much about her online. The fundraising page from a race she ran, a blurry picture from a work holiday party, a profile for the clinic in Boston with a small headshot and a list of her qualifications. BSc. King’s College London 1974, Oxford University Merton College 1968–70. I read through it again. Tessa went to Oxford, but didn’t graduate. She left after two years and finished her degree in London. Before that, though, she was in the same year as my father and his friends.
I can’t decide whether or not to call her. She might be close with my father, she might warn him after we speak. Though that seems unlikely. Why would he have looked up a friend’s name twice in the last month? Especially when there’s so little about her online.
With the time difference, I have to wait until the afternoon to call. When a receptionist answers, I say, “May I speak with Tessa Martin?”
“She’s not available. Are you a patient?”
&
nbsp; “No, a friend. Can you please ask her to call me?” I give her my number and say, “My name’s Lydia Spenser.”
Half an hour later, my phone rings. “This is Tessa,” she says. She still has an English accent, even though she’s lived in America for years.
“Thank you for calling me back,” I say. She waits for me to continue. She recognized my name, she hasn’t asked how we know each other. “I don’t really know where to start. My father’s Colin Spenser. Do you know him?”
“Why?”
“I found your name in some of his things.”
“Is he dead?” she asks.
“No,” I say, and she falls silent. “I’m trying to understand what happened in my family. If you did know him, I won’t tell anyone.”
“Are you a reporter?”
“No.”
“Can you prove it?”
“My mum would be sixty-two on December second.”
“You could have looked that up.”
The trouble is so much has been published about us, there’s little I know that a stranger couldn’t. “When he was at Oxford, my father loaned his car to his friend Sam Brudenell, and Sam was in an accident on the Abingdon Road.”
Tessa breathes in sharply. “How old are you?”
“Thirty-four.”
“I’ve always wondered what happened to you and your brother.” Her voice has an echo now, like she’s gone into a different room. I answer her questions about where we moved afterwards, how we’ve stayed anonymous.
“Why would my father search for your name? How did you know him?”
“I had a tutorial with Sam,” says Tessa. She stops and clears her throat. “He asked me out to his friends’ party. There were fifteen of us, the eight Ramsden Club members, me and six other girls.
